Created at: Wednesday, 9 September 2026 2:48:41 pm Last Modify: Wednesday, 9 September 2026 2:48:41 pm

Hosting NAS with HDDs

About half a year ago, I brought a disk case and 6x8T HDD as part of my NAS system.

TL;DR

I would say, if it wasn't the price hike of SSDs, I wouldn't use HDD in my NAS.

The Good

It's relatively cheap to get a very huge amount of storage space even with RAID5.

The BAD

• Noisy, it's very noisy when there's disk activity.
• Slow, it's god damn slow even with RAID5 configured, once in-memory cache is used up, good luck with uploading your linux isos.
• Also slow on read, since RAID5 is configured, data is stripped all over the place, it won't do sequential reads.
• SLOW on ready for disk activity. The Disk cage I use will poweroff harddrives when there's no disk activity. So when I start to write something to it, I have to wait for at least half a minute for it to warm up.

Conclusion

Don't use HDD if you can.